Anders

“I have greatest confidence in my writing when it approaches an insane condition in a sober and unstrained manner.”
― Flore Chevaillier, Divergent Trajectories: Interviews with Innovative Fiction Writers

“because after a week without creation—the antithesis of genesis—comes a nightfall of alcohol intake, of cavortingfightingfornicating and other fundamental merriments, so in the scraped-up face of dawn I take to shakes and shivers and cries into an enemy pillow, growing mossy with hate.”
― Marc Anthony Richardson, Year of the Rat

“Modern culture rejects this belief in a great cosmic plan. We are not actors in any larger-than-life drama. Life has no script, no playwright, no director, no producer – and no meaning. To the best of our scientific understanding, the universe is a blind and purposeless process, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. During our infinitesimally brief stay on our tiny speck of a planet, we fret and strut this way and that, and then are heard of no more.

Since there is no script, and since humans fulfil no role in any great drama, terrible things might befall us and no power will come to save us or give meaning to our suffering. There won’t be a happy ending, or a bad ending, or any ending at all. Things just happen, one after the other. The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause. If modernity has a motto, it is ‘shit happens’.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“There was a deep wisdom behind the orgiastic and hysterical aspects of ancient religion; there is much to be said in favour of this flinging open of the floodgates to grief. It might be argued that the decorous little services of the West, the hushed voices, the self-control, our brave smiles and calmness either stifle the emotion of sorrow completely, or drive it underground where it lodges and proliferates in a malign and dangerous growth that festers for a lifetime.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese